WLC: "You can't prove the negative"

[Belacqua]

But then they hit you with "you cannot prove there is no Loch Ness Monster" and eventually you'd need to explain to them that that's not how it works and will probably involve burden of proof being mentioned. Then in your discussion they hit you with "I'm trying to discuss not win internet debates".

I don't doubt that this is your experience of such discussions. I'm not saying you're wrong. 

No doubt I've come at this from a different background, and this has allowed me to avoid the kind of thing you describe. I'm also not very patient with people who are obviously silly or vulgar, so I just walk away from discussion with them and don't prolong the agony. 

I was raised completely without religion. We were in a small town but this was back in the old days before the Republicans weaponized Christianity, as described in the book What's the Matter with Kansas?. Religion was still considered a private thing, and I had no idea what anybody else thought. Nor had the "New Atheists" started to fight. Then as soon as I was able I ran to academia and the art world in big cities (Chicago, New York, London, Hiroshima), where atheism is pretty much the norm. 

When I first started discussing stuff like this on the Internet I was on a much bigger web site with more people and more diverse views (sadly, now defunct). As I say, I ignored the foolish people. There were three Christians who largely undid my prejudices about Christianity. 

One was an elderly woman who had been one of the first women to be ordained as a minister in her denomination. She was a brilliant and fascinating person. Her husband had been a lead editor of the DSM-3, and her son founded a famous rock band. 

There was also an economist who had worked in the Clinton White House. When his term ended, his wife got some kind of international job in Geneva and he took a few years off, which meant he had free time to discuss his religion with us. His theology was very much in the vein of Simone Weil and Martin Buber, so he was completely uninterested in proving the existence of supernatural entities, and he was pleased to find a church in Switzerland that was entirely in line with these beliefs.

And there was a nuclear physicist who was doing some kind of research in Europe. I don't know what it was exactly, but I expect I wouldn't have understood it. He was fluent in Russian and knew a lot about supercomputers. Like the economist, he saw Christianity more as a moral commitment and never tried to persuade us about metaphysical truths. He was Protestant but very much drawn to the Catholic aesthetics he saw in Europe.

And there was a guy who was doing his PhD in philosophy at the University of Chicago. He wasn't religious at all, but he knew about the "God of the Philosophers," Prime Mover arguments, and things like that, so he could tell us what these arguments really say, as opposed to the caricatures we usually see.

With all of these people we just had conversations. No one was interested in debate formalities or Robert's Rules of Order, so no one ever mentioned burdens of proof. 

All this time I was working on my doctorate in the philosophy of art, and doing (far more than I had imagined when I began) research on the relationship between theology and aesthetics. So there were lots of seminars where religion was discussed, and if anyone in an academic setting had tried to offload the burden of proof onto someone else, rather than make his own case, he would have been laughed at.